While I still loathe posting here...are the days of General Discussion numbered?

SlumlordThanatos·5/13/2014, 7:14:07 AM·7 votes·4,030 views

I figured this would be the best place to post this question, since more Reds tend to check this particular area out.

But...pretty much what the title says. What are your plans for General Discussion as they stand right now? Are we going to see any improvements in the forum (avatars, post tracking, and the like)? Do I need to be worried about its closure, and if not, do I need to worry about it being abandoned by the developers?

I still hate it here. This layout still makes my eyes bleed. I will never post here on a regular basis. But as long as I can remain where I'm at now, I'm willing to begrudgingly tolerate this place.

25 Comments

Pendragon5/16/2014, 12:13:48 AM5 votes

I'd love to know more about what you don't like here. I think generally we'd like to get the boards to a place where the vast majority of players obviously prefer them to the forums, but we're really taking a "free market" approach to growth here.

Even inside of Riot - we're asking people to try these out but not forcing anyone to do so. Some people love them, some hate them and in either case we're getting as much feedback as we can to improve the system here.

It's not likely that many feature improvements will be made to the forums. They're very expensive (on development time) to improve relative to the impact of the improvements. Something that takes a few hours to do here would take days or weeks over there. There will be times though when improving something here means it's a lot easier to improve something over there, so we'll absolutely do that. Finally replacing the question marks with summoner icons is a great example of that.

If you have time could you please get more specific about things that you like and don't like here? When you say "layout" do you mean how comments nest, the colors used, the markdown system, not having bumps, etc?

tl;dr We don't have hard-set plans to close General Discussion but that doesn't mean it won't ever happen. We are taking an "organic" approach to building following over here by trying to make this a great place for people to go.

ModCaptainMårvelous5/13/2014, 10:21:04 AM4 votes

The plan is and has always been to upgrade the community beta where it feels like a more natural place to post conversation as well as a better one. In fact I'd say as it is now it's incredibly better than anything on the old forums no matter how much nostalgia blindness some people suffer from. (Not referring to you, I'm more so talking about some less-than-cordial people).

The forums will ALWAYS be there in the current plans until this gets so good that everyone wants to come here and they can get rid of it. (Which will be never.)

Sir ArmaMalum5/13/2014, 11:05:07 PM1 votes

Pretty much what CaptainMarvelous said, there will be a switch eventually. But that probably won't be for at be for quite a while so there's really no reason to worry.

I'll be the first to say the CB is still unfinished and there are things about it people won't like as it is now, but I highly advise you to at least give it an honest try you may be surprised at what you find.

WorstVayneMars5/17/2014, 12:45:46 AM1 votes

I hate how this is styled after Reddit's format. Upvotes and Downvotes can serve to limit discussion by pushing controversial, but substantive topics down whereas unconstructive fluff (not to say that light hearted threads like champion appreciation ones should not exist) may get upvoted from time to time and take the place of truly positive threads.

I can barely follow thread conversations on Reddit and the Community Beta doesn't serve this any better because it is similar to Reddit.

That being said I do like how I have quick and easy access to the "subcommunities' and I can make a thread anywhere and have it posted on any subcommunity without having to enter it's site to make a post.

My suggestion is to keep the old forum's style of thread posting, conversation following and bumping but keep Reddit's accessibility to threads.